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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> Prediction: this will go the same way as RSS.

Meaning what? RSS remains ubiquitous. It’s rare to find a website which doesn’t support it, even if the owners don’t realise it or link to it on their page. RSS remains as useful as it ever was. Even if some websites only share partial post content via RSS, it’s still useful to know when they are available (and can be used as an automation hook to get the full thing).

RSS is alive and well. It’s like if you wrote “this will go the same way as the microwave oven”.

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The built-in RSS reader in Firefox was removed. (But extensions exist to add RSS reader to Firefox.)

Google killed Google Reader. (Other products exist you can use instead.)

Facebook removed support for RSS feeds. (You can replace it with third party tools or API calls.)

It’s not dead dead, but it did seem to lose some momentum and support over time on several fronts.

> It’s not dead dead

It’s not dead, period. Not dead, dead dead, dead dead dead, or any other combination.

Yes, some integrations were removed, but on the whole you have more apps and services for it than ever. The death of the behemoth that was Google Reader was a positive there.

Maybe fewer people are using it, but the technology itself is fine and continues to be widely available and supported by most websites, which was the point.

Maybe Facebook and Instagram don’t have RSS access, but you can’t even navigate two pages on them without an account, anyway. They are closed to everything they don’t control, which has nothing to do with RSS.

I got the feeling that it was dead long ago. Sure there's plenty of readers and lots of sites "support" it, but what they tend to give you is a headline and article blurb feed with links to click through to see the ads. They don't want you consuming their articles through a reader. That's what makes it "dead" to me and a lot of others.

These products were phased out because most people weren't using them.

RSS is and always was very niche. There are always claims that companies killed RSS for nefarious reasons, but I think the truth is much simpler: Companies stopped putting resources into RSS tools because very few people use them.

The people who use RSS are very vocal about their support, but they're a small minority of internet users. Even I started with an RSS reader but found myself preferring a set of bookmarked favorites to the sites I wanted to read, even though they're not equivalent in functionality. For my use case, a random sampling of websites that I could visit during times I had 15 free minutes to read something was better than collecting everything into one big feed, even though I would have guessed the opposite before trying both ways.

Was RSS was not niche, and it's not niche today unless you consider podcasts niche. Also most new social media platforms have RSS built in.

It was nefariously killed by companies, especially news sites, who saw no good way to monetize RSS feeds, and would much rather you keep clicking bookmarks to be served new ads.

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